Jay Winston Mitchell

Jay Winston Mitchell passed away July 9, 2017 at his home on Bainbridge Island. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa on January 9, 1937, the youngest child of Jay Austin and Ruth Mitchell.

Jay attended East High School in Des Moines and graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in architecture. In 1960, he married Janice Livengood and moved to San Francisco, where he completed his Naval service and practiced architecture.

Jay joined the Rex Whitaker Allen and Associates architectural firm in San Francisco, where he helped design several California hospitals, including the Mercy San Juan hospital in Carmichael and the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. Later, he joined with friends to create the architectural firm Sabin O’Neal Mitchell. In 1973, the firm merged with Hoover Associates. Jay became president of the firm in 1983 and remained so until his retirement in 1995. He contributed to many commercial, public and residential building projects, including Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, and the restoration of the Stanford Theater in downtown Palo Alto.

Jay, Jan, and their two children, Jay Curtis and Jill, resided in Palo Alto, California, at the time of Jan’s death in 1988. Jay married fellow widow Marilyn Price in 1990 and adopted her young daughter, Sarah. Throughout their marriage, Jay and Marilyn honored the memories of their late spouses and joyfully embraced an expanded family of six Mitchell and Price children.

Jay, Marilyn, and Sarah traveled extensively, and lived in Oxford, England for a year in 1993. When they returned to the United States, they moved from Palo Alto to Sammamish, Washington. In 2001, they moved to Bainbridge Island, where they lived in a house Jay designed to perfectly fit its location on Eagle Harbor.

A generous and kind man, Jay found many ways to give back to the community. Some of his contributions included serving as a deacon and elder at First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto; chairing the Palo Alto Planning Commission; serving on the Board of Directors of the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington; chairing the Building and Grounds ministry at Grace Episcopal Church in Bainbridge Island; and co-chairing, for a decade, the vehicle donations for Bainbridge Island’s annual Rotary Auction. A devoted Rotarian, Jay served on numerous committees and worked for many years on service scholarships for youth.